Field of the Invention
The systems and methods disclosed herein relate generally to scalable, collaborative, real-time graphical life-management interface.
Description of the Related Art
The personal computing (PC) era began with text-based user interfaces. As PC technology developed, a ceiling was reached for the capability of text-based computers, and graphical user interfaces were born. Thereafter, the Internet became available, and the need arose for simplified graphical user interfaces, which could be easily transported over network communications. However, these simplified graphical user interfaces are struggling to keep up with the added functionality users are demanding from these devices. For example, these interfaces struggle to organize and manage the dozens (or hundreds) of apps that users commonly install. Further, they struggle to deal with the barrage of texts, Tweets, alerts, alarms, badges, calls and other real-time data and prompts that come to these devices. Currently, however, a new need has arisen. The ceiling for simplified, non-collaborative, non-real-time graphical user interfaces has now been reached. Conventional technology attempts to use the same static, efficiency-focused user interfaces that were ideal for event-based computing twenty years ago with today's mobile devices that are always on and always connected. The result is that the user interfaces of today's mobile devices do not scale very well as new functionality is added, and require additional interfaces such as notification centers to deal with the real-time events like text, Tweets, social media updates, and etc. Consequently, users are forced to perform lots of swiping, scrolling, navigating, and integration operations, or otherwise settle for getting less out of their devices. Thus, what is needed is a scalable, collaborative, real-time graphical user interface.
Platform providers, such as Facebook™, Google™, and Apple™, all vie to lock-in users to their proprietary platforms. However, what most users want is to use multiple social media providers and have access to all of their data across different platforms with a consistent interface. For example, users want to use Facebook™, Twitter™, and Linked-In™ on their PC at work, their Macintosh™ at home, their iPad™ on the go, and their Android™-based smart phone in their pocket without having to bounce back and forth between applications.